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Friday Squid Blogging: 13-foot Tentacle Found off Santa Cruz Coast

A fisherman snags a rare catch in the Santa Barbara Channel, a tentacle belonging to a giant squid.

The 13-foot-long tentacle was found floating near Santa Cruz Island last week. Little is known about the species, it is only the fourth confirmed specimen ever found in Southern California.

"They are definitely present off our coast, they are probably not very common here and they probably live in deep water, this one here was caught near the Santa Cruz Basin, which is several thousand feet deep," said Eric Hochberg, Santa Barbara Museum of Natural History Curator.

The tentacle likely surfaced after the rest of the squid was eaten by a whale.

Comments

Next, they'll be suspecting the squid of harboring terrorists. Meanwhile, the terrorists should study the squid's techniques. Any creature that can hide this well deserves to be emulated. Should we postulate that the squid found off LA was there to collect data for a terrorist strike against US shipping interests?

The thing is, I can imagine some people I know believing that this is the case.

What is more effective: implanting wireless cameras on the foreheads of sperm whales hoping that one of them might stumble upon a notoriously rare giant squid and devour it, while the lighting is sufficient to see what is happening, the camera does not get dislodged, and the remote transmission is unhindered from the location. Or searching for the giant squid directly?

(Hint: Tradeoffs it is about for security - Yoda).

"National Geographic tried several times, unsuccessfully, to document a live giant squid in the wild.

Failure was not for want of imagination. Geographic specialists tried attaching "Crittercams," cameras attached temporarily to sperm whales, the predators of giant squid. They also used "Ropecams," cameras dangled on baited lines thousands of feet long."

Headline quibble: saying "off Santa Cruz Coast" makes one think of the Monterey Bay, 300 miles north of where this was actually found. "off Santa Cruz Island" (or "Santa Barbara Channel" as the quote itself uses) would be less confusing since the hippie town is far better known nationally than the undeveloped island.

you're not the first person to have this idea, but it's just not feasible. You've got to have a camera that can survive rapid dives of a thousand meters or more, carries its own light source and sufficient batteries to run it for however long it takes for your whale to locate a squid, and then you've got to figure out some way to strap it on the whale in a position where it can actually see what's going on in the general vicinity of the front part of the whale. Then you've got to pray it stays stuck on while a half-ton of enraged cephalopod thrashes around in the whale's jaws.

The squid photos that made the news last year were done with a camera that was powered remotely and only snapped a picture every 30 seconds, of a squid that was caught on a baited hook. Your chances are much better with something like that than just stapling a million-dollar video camera to a sperm whale and hoping for the best.

And we have House Homeland Security Chairman Peter King endorsing the idea that people of "Middle Eastern and South Asian" descent to undergo additional security checks because of their ethnicity and religion.

P.Z. Myers linked an article about an encounter with Humboldt squid in the Sea of Cortez. An excerpt:

"Humboldt squid have approximately 1,200 sucker discs, each one lined with 20 to 26 needle-sharp teeth. This allows the Humboldt to attack its prey with more than 24,000 teeth at once. And nestled in its bed of eight muscular arms and two feeding tentacles is a disproportionately large, knife-edged beak similar to a parrot’s. But the Humboldt is much larger than a parrot: they have been found as large as 14 feet in length and weighing more than 700 pounds."

The diver, who was wearing an armored diving suit, was attacked by five squid and sustained numerous large bruises.

Funny you're right about the Santa Cruz coastline being north of the Santa Barabara coastline. However, I must point out that calling Santa Cruz a "hippie town" is like calling San Francisco a "gold miner town". There was a time when the term described a population boom, but today hippies are essentially imperceptable compared to dominant populations of foreign tourists, hot-rodders, surfers, survivalists, high-tech entrepreneurs, real-estate barrons, Central American gangs, outdoor extreme athletes, etc.. More relevant, perhaps, is that some groups in Santa Cruz (like anywhere) use their fear and hatred of another group to help justify their own cohesion -- "we may not like each other much, but at least we agree that we hate the [group x]". Might as well hate something that doesn't exist, or that you never see, but woe be the person who gets tagged incorrectly.